


no one left behind

by a_splash_of_stucky



Series: Happy Steve Bingo 2018 [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cats, Fluff, Gen, Kittens, cuteness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 15:40:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16121585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_splash_of_stucky/pseuds/a_splash_of_stucky
Summary: Steve becomes a cat-dad.





	no one left behind

**Author's Note:**

> I love Steve and I love cats, so this fic was kinda meant to be. All the cats in this fic are inspired by cats I've had at some point in my life. 
> 
> Written for the Happy Steve Bingo, filling the "Kittens" square.

Steve expertly guides his bike into his garage before putting down the kickstand and killing the engine. He pulls off his helmet and gloves, then rakes his fingers through his sweaty hair as he sighs in relief, grateful to finally be home. **  
**

‘Home’ for Steve refers to a refurbished warehouse about forty minutes away from Avengers Tower. It’s in a derelict industrial area, complete with sagging chain-link fences and crude graffiti adorning nearly every surface. There’re a lot of immigrants in the place, which makes for some pretty delicious takeout shops.

The Tower’s nice enough, and his floor has all the gadgets and gizmos that he could ever need (and then some), but there’s just something about this place that fills him with a sense of peace.

Steve’s spent the better part of the last three years working on this warehouse, tearing the walls down, only to build them back up. It had been his project, something that he worked on in between missions.

The warehouse is large and spacious, as warehouses tend to be. It’s got two floors and all the conveniences of the modern world, without any of the frivolous stuff. He’s opted for an open floor-plan, so all the rooms are connected to basically everything else, which makes the place seem even bigger than it is.

His garage is in a small outhouse located to the east of the warehouse itself. Once he’s stowed his helmet and gloves, Steve locks the garage, then heads out onto the short gravel path that takes him from his garage to his front door.

He’s itching to get inside and soak in a nice long bath, preferably with some Netflix and a tub of ice cream. This week’s mission had been particularly gruelling, and though he doesn’t have any severe injuries, his muscles are still sore from making the arduous trek across the Swiss Alps.

The Alps are just as bad now as they were back in the war.

Steve fishes his keys out of his back pocket as he comes up to his door. He pauses abruptly, immediately on edge when he notices that the shoe cupboard beside his front door is slightly ajar.

He’s sure that he closed it up properly when he left.

Tentatively, he wedges the toe of his boot into the gap and, after a deep breath, whips the door open, internally bracing himself to see a bomb or something.

What he sees instead is quite the opposite.

There, nestled amongst his Uggs and loafers, is a grey tabby, curled protectively around four tiny balls of fur. She blinks up at him, mildly dazed by the sudden burst of sunlight. Her mouth opens on a little meow.

Steve blinks, stunned.

Well then. This isn’t what he was expecting.

“Hey there,” he says quietly, as he slowly sinks into a squat, resting his elbows on his thighs. The mama tracks him with her intelligent green eyes, but makes no move to attack him. This close, he realises that the kittens are suckling on her.

“Wow,” Steve breathes, as he gets a proper look at them.

He’d thought there were four kittens, but as it turns out, there are five; one of the kittens is currently being squashed by all their siblings. One kitten is an orange tabby and one kitten looks like a miniature replica of its mother. The biggest kitten has fur as white as snow and is currently trampling a kitten that’s black all over, except for its paws, which are white — it looks like it’s got socks on. The kitten that’s being squashed by its siblings is white with black spots on it.

Steve watches them for a few seconds, a smile on his face; there’s something so serene about the scene.

It’s clear that they’ve been here for some time — maybe the mama even gave birth in his shoe cupboard. The strong odour of cat piss fills Steve’s nostrils, and a couple of bones on the floor indicate that mama has been out hunting for food at least once. Steve doesn’t know a lot about kittens, but judging by their size, these ones look to be a few weeks old, possibly.

Hesitantly, Steve stretches out his right hand, offering his fingers to the mama, for her to sniff. She recoils in suspicion at first, but after regarding him with baleful eyes for a few seconds, she leans forward and gives him a curious sniff. Mama cat doesn’t flinch away when Steve brushes his fingers over her head, so he takes that as a good sign.

Her fur is softer than he expected it to be — it’s silky, like the fur throws he’s got on his couch. When she tips her head up and back, he notices for the first time a dark grey collar wrapped around her neck. The fabric is dirty and fraying at the edges, and it’s digging into her fur like it’s uncomfortably tight. The place where a tag should be hanging is empty and the metal slightly deformed, as if the tag has been ripped off.

Steve presumes that this cat has been abandoned, possibly because she got pregnant.

People can be pretty damn cruel, sometimes.

He can’t leave her to be choking on her own collar, so Steve snaps into action. Hastily, he unlocks his front door, keys in his passcodes to turn off the alarm systems, then dashes into the kitchen, in search of a box. He finds a large delivery box in his recycling pile which he opts to use.

Steve stops by his laundry room to retrieve some old clothes that he’d been planning to donate at the local charity store. A few of t-shirts will make for some nice, soft bedding.

Once he’s back outside, Steve sets the box down by the shoe cupboard. Mama cat blinks her green eyes at him curiously.

“I’m gonna move you guys in here,” Steve tells her, as if she’s intelligent enough to talk back to him.

Then again, who knows. Cats are strange creatures — perhaps she does understand English.

Steve hopes that mama cat doesn’t mind being picked up. Gingerly, he reaches into the shoe cupboard and gets his hands around her; luckily, she doesn’t twist away or try to scratch him. Steve winces when the kittens begin mewling in distress as soon as he lifts her up, their sharp, pitiful cries piercing the air.

Mama cat wriggles in his grip and tries to get away, so Steve quickly dumps her into the box, then hastily scoops the kittens up in his big hands and places them inside, next to her.

Steve takes a step back and gives them all a minute to settle down. He watches as the mama licks at her kittens to make sure that they’re safe, purring loudly all the while to soothe them. The orange and white kittens are nuzzling insistently at her tummy, so she plops back down onto her side, allowing all five kittens to latch on again. Once they’re suckling happily, mama cat glances up at Steve and flicks her tail lazily, as if to say  _we’re in here — what’s next?_

“I’m gonna carry you inside, okay?” he says, in response to her silent question. Whether by coincidental timing or because she understands and actually agrees to his suggestion, at that moment, she flops her head down and closes her eyes.

Confident that they’re not going to put up too much of a fuss, Steve gets to his feet and picks up the box, taking care not to jostle the inhabitants around too much. He sees mama cat tense up in alarm, but she makes no move to leap out of the box, which he is thankful for. Steve carries them into his house, kicking the front door shut with his foot. For lack of a better place to put the box, he sets it down on the kitchen floor, beside the island, before hunting through his drawers for a pair of kitchen shears to cut off that collar.

“Aha!” he says triumphantly, when he finds them in his cutlery drawer.

( _Why_  they were in his cutlery drawer he’s not entirely sure. He thinks Sam might’ve had something to do with that.)

Shears in hand, Steve kneels beside the box and waves them at the mama.

“I’m gonna cut that off you,” he says, gesturing towards the collar. “You’re gonna feel better after that.”

For a brief moment, Steve wonders why he’s narrating everything that he’s doing to the cat. He finds that he’s got no answer for himself other than ‘it feels appropriate’.

After adjusting his grip on the handle, Steve reaches into the box, moving slowly so as to not startle anyone. Mama cat tenses like she’s going to scurry away when he grabs her collar between his finger and thumb, but relaxes again when she realises that he means her no harm. Her tail is curled protectively over her kittens — and isn’t that just the sweetest thing he’s ever seen?

With one quick snip, the fabric collar has been cut. Steve backs away fast, so that he doesn’t stress the mama out any further. She shakes her head and moves it around, like she’s relieved to have finally regained full range of movement in her neck. He fishes the offending collar out of the box and dumps it into the trash, before heading to the sink to wash his hands.

Steve leans against the island as he observes the mama and her kittens, who have now had their fill of milk and are eagerly exploring the box that Steve’s put them in. Since she’s no longer being crushed by her offspring, mama cat pushes herself up onto her legs, eyes the edge of the box, before elegantly leaping out of it. Once outside, she sits down beside it, then turns to look up at Steve.

They stare each other down for a few long seconds, before she finally lets out a quiet meow.

Steve tilts his head to the side. “What?”

In response, she gets up and starts sniffing the corners of the box. Her kittens are still playing inside it, curiously examining his old t-shirts.

“You want me to take ‘em out?” he asks her.

She turns to him and lets out another meow — somehow, she sounds more insistent this time.

“Okay, sure — I can do that,” Steve says easily.

He picks the kittens up one by one, depositing them on the kitchen floor, beside their mama. They’re so — tiny. He can feel the rapid flutter of their heartbeats against his fingers when he picks them up. They wriggle and mewl, unaccustomed to being lifted so high, but once he’s put them back on solid ground, they calm down again.

Upon further inspection, Steve realises that these kittens must be a couple of months’ old, at least. They’ve moved past the ‘drowned-rat’ stage of their life, and now resemble fluffy balls of fur with legs. They’re toddling around, barely able to stay on their feet as they pad across the kitchen tiles, still not quite able to properly coordinate their limbs. It’s clear that they have a while to go before they develop the quiet grace that is so typical of felines.

Mama cat is busy licking herself clean, but from the way her ears are constantly twitching, Steve knows that she’s keeping an eye on her little ones.

Slowly, Steve sinks to the floor and folds his legs underneath himself, so that he can watch the kittens better. They’re extremely alert, looking around his place with their wide, inquisitive eyes. He watches as the white one with black spots playfully leaps onto a couple of its siblings, which results in a brief tussle amongst all three of them.

The black one with white paws toddles over to him. Steve watches with bated breath as it sniffs curiously at his kneecap.

Apparently, he smells okay, because a second later, the kitten digs its claws into his trousers and clumsily climbs onto his thigh. It sits down and looks up at Steve with its big blue eyes, before letting out the tiniest of squeaks.

A funny feeling blooms in Steve’s chest. It’s as if his heart is rapidly expanding, growing so large that it’s pressing up against his ribcage and squashing his lungs, making it harder to breathe.

He realises that the kitten looks like a cat that he had back when he was a kid.

Or, well.

 _He_  didn’t have a cat, so much as the cat had a human. He and Bucky had called her Misty, and she used to come to his fire-escape every now and then. She’d been a scrap of a thing, always peering at the world through suspicious, beady eyes, but for whatever strange reason, she had a soft spot for Steve. He used to leave bits of food out for her, if ever he had any to spare.

Steve takes one look at mama cat, gives a cursory glance over her balls of fluff and decides then and there that there is no way he’s kicking any of them out.

“We need to give you all names,” he decides.

“I’m calling you Stripey,” says Steve, addressing the mama cat. Yeah, maybe it’s a tad unoriginal, but she’s got black stripes on the bottom half of her long tail — it’s a sensible name for a cat.

Steve settles on Snowball for the white kitten and Junior for the kitten who looks like a miniature version of Stripey. The white one with black spots is called Spotty (again: super original) and the orange tabby he names Sam, because Sam’s more of a dog person, and Steve’s got a twisted sense of humour.

“And you,” he says, talking to the kitten still perched on his thigh. He boops its nose with the tip of his finger. “I’m calling you Mittens.”

The kitten meows in response. Steve takes that as a seal of approval.

It is at this moment that Steve realises that his house is sorely under-equipped to take care of a cat and five kittens; he hasn’t even got any  _milk_ in the fridge, for fuck’s sake.  

“JARVIS?” he calls.

“Yes, Captain Rogers?” JARVIS replies.

Tony had insisted that he integrated the AI’s system into his warehouse, so that Steve would still be able to receive news from the Tower (in case of emergencies). JARVIS also handles his state-of-the-art security system, which is an added bonus.

“I’m gonna need everything you’d need to look after a cat,” says Steve. “Uh — cat food, kitty litter, a litter box. Maybe some catnip — is that even a thing? Oh, and a cat tree.”

Stripey perks up at the words ‘cat tree’ and turns to look at him, her eyes narrowed accusingly.

“Make that two cat trees.”

“That’s all been ordered, Captain, as well as some cat treats and nutritional supplements you might consider useful,” JARVIS says smoothly, “They’re due to arrive at your warehouse by the end of the day.”

———

Sam pays Steve a visit two weeks later.

He opens the front door using his spare key, only to trip over a cat toy that had been left on the floor. Just as he opens his mouth to ask Steve why the hell he has a cat toy, a ball of orange fur skitters across the floor, towards the kitchen.

Two seconds later, four other balls of fluff appear out of nowhere, racing off in the same direction.

“You got  _kittens_?” he asks incredulously.

“Yeah!” Steve calls, from the kitchen. “The orange one’s named Sam.”

“Aw, you named your cat after me?” says Sam, sounding pleased. He pauses for a moment, a slight furrow developing between his brows.

“Steve, you know I hate cats.”

“I know you do. That’s why I called him Sam.”

“Goddammit Rogers,” Sam mutters.

**Author's Note:**

> [rebloggable version](https://a-splash-of-stucky.tumblr.com/post/178540958010/no-one-left-behind/)
> 
>  
> 
> comments and kudos make me smile :D


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